How to Want Things Again

We all live in a perpetual state of unwanting

Sam Kriss wrote a fantastic essay on streaming platforms and zombies. Don’t ask me how he managed to combine those topics, and go read it. It’s… special. His basic thesis is powerful: We no longer consume algorithmically-sorted content, we consume the sorting algorithm itself.

At first I thought, “What the hell is he talking about,” and then I thought, “yeah, he’s definitely right.” I found the simplest example that verifies Kriss’s hypothesis: We don’t say, “What are you watching on TikTok?” We use the verb scrolling. Why? Because the watching part is not relevant. The video itself is only interesting insofar as it belongs in the middle of an infinite chain of videos. Your brain doesn’t yearn for you to consume content but for you to scroll past content.

The real reason why you waste your life on social media is that your brain wants to consume the liminal space — the transition — between content. The highest high is not at the beginning of a video, not even at the end — when have you last watched an entire 60-second clip? — but at the moment your finger taps the screen, the current video is already halfway gone, slipping off the top edge, while the next one creeps up from below. It is at that fleeting instant, barely noticeable, that you see the infinite chain: the…